AMD detonates Trinity: Behold Bulldozer’s second coming

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AMD’s Cayman – Trinity’s Linchpin

In most literature, AMD refers to Trinity’s GPU as a “Northern Islands” class part without bothering to explain whether it’s based on Barts (a modest step forward from the old 5000 series) or Cayman (the high-end GPU that AMD confined to the 6900 series). Officially, it’s branding the new core as part of the Radeon 7000 family, which isn’t accurate either.

Trying to make sense of AMD’s branding has become murky at best. The 7000M brand is now polluted with three types of GPUs — 40nm rebrands of 6000 parts which are based on Barts/Turks, 28nm parts based on GCN (Graphics Core Next), and 32nm APUs based on Cayman. Trying to hash out which GPUs are the best match for the APU is a task better left to saints and madmen then poor journalists; we’ll leave the topic of paired graphics for another day.

Unlike Llano, whose integrated GPU was nearly identical to AMD’s discrete “Redwood” part, there’s no easy point of comparison for Cayman. The new GPU features an array of six SIMD clusters of 64 cores each; Llano had five SIMDs of 80 cores. The new GPU is slightly smaller than its predecessor, with 384 cores instead of 400, but one of the features AMD introduced with Cayman was a VLIW4 architecture that was significantly more efficient than the VLIW5 designs that preceeded it. AMD has also increased the number of texture units, to a maximum of 24, up from Llano’s 20. The total number of ROPs remains the same, at eight.

When it comes to game performance, AMD is more willing to share the goodies.

All game tests run at 1920x1080

The company has a bad habit of switching back and forth between desktop parts and laptop parts, and there’s no Ivy Bridge comparison data. Still, things look good. This was very nearly a given; Cayman made a number of efficiency improvements that were logical fits for Trinity, and all of AMD’s APU demos in the run up to launch focused on the GPU.

Trinity moves AMD forward, buys time for 2013 launches

After talking with AMD and reading over the company’s presentations, our educated bet is that Trinity is a qualified success. Piledriver may not move the bar very much on the CPU side of the equation, but between power consumption, temperature, and performance, AMD had to fix the first two to have any chance of launching a mobile part based on the architecture. If Piledriver can match Llano clock-for-clock (or within the same TDP), that’s still significantly more than BD managed when compared to Istanbul/Thuban.

Will it compete effectively against Ivy Bridge? No. But it was never intended to. AMD’s goal with Trinity is to position the CPU as a successor to Llano, a further fulfillment of the company’s “Fusion” vision, and as an anchor in the popular $400-$700 segment. Based on what we’ve seen and a few educated guesses, it’s got a fair chance of pulling it off — short term.

No matter how successful Trinity is in 2012, it doesn’t change the fact that AMD has no traction in tablets or sub-10W designs at a time when companies like Qualcomm have given notice that they intend to move into PCs. That’s fine for the moment, because Windows 8 won’t drop until the latter half of the year, and it’ll take 4-6 months past that point for some of the traditional smartphone/tablet players to make moves into the low-end PC space.

AMD needs a quick jump to 28nm Brazos and a fast refresh on Trinity. In theory, the new chips — Kabini and Kaveri — will be ready in 2013. The company has yet to put a quarter on that number, or to even comment on where the parts are being made. Trinity may be a good beginning, but it’s only that; AMD has a long way to go when it comes to carving out its own territory in between Intel at the top of the market and an onslaught of ARM-based hardware at the bottom.

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